“Are you sure? I heard sounds, I felt something moving around.”
“A bad dream,” her husband whispered, and her breathing slowed. Over her shoulder, he could see his son, small and slight in his little boy’s pajamas. Up and alert when he should have been long asleep in his bed. Jip stood there staring right through them, with his inscrutable eyes, as if they were the intruders in his house, the unexpected visitors in the middle of the night.
Two
Holly lied to her husband and son so she could sneak off to see the priest. Early on the Saturday before Christmas, she announced that she had some last-minute shopping to do and that she might return late because of the crowds. Midway through their oatmeal, the boys offered no rebuttal, just a wave of their spoons as she fled the house, winding a scarf around her neck, wrapped in layers of wool.
A wet wind blew against the car, so she cranked up the heater for the short ride. Fat gray clouds scudded across the sky, heading over the ocean. She turned on the radio in time to catch the last few lines of “The Little Drummer Boy.” Blech, she mimed shoving her finger down her throat. That insipid lyric, that numbing tune. She poked the button on the dashboard to silence the song.
She had been on edge for two weeks now, ever since that morning when Jack surprised her with a punch to the face. The bruise had faded, but she could still feel the sting. And then there was the weirdness with her husband, how he was seeing things out in the snow, how he refused to believe her when she heard those strange noises in the night. Her sleep, never truly peaceful, had grown erratic, and she was a mess at the office, chewing out the poor receptionist over one missed call. Ten days of that tension rolled by before she picked up the phone and called Father Bolden, and that first conversation felt like going to confession when she was a little girl. Bless me, Father, these are my sins, and the sheer relief when stepping out of the dark box and saying a few prayers to erase the slate.
By the time Holly pulled into the church parking lot, she had nearly banished the maddening carol from her mind, but the damn thing had thrown off all that she had rehearsed in the days leading up to her appointment with Father Bolden. They had gotten through the preliminaries over the phone, yet ever since that hesitant exchange, she had been practicing what she wanted to say, feeling a bit guilty that she had omitted to tell the worst of her worries. Now the “rump-a-pum-pum” had drummed it from her mind. For a long time, she sat in the cooling car, wondering where to begin. With the strange events of the past two weeks, the weird noises in her head. Or back to that summer when Jack first refused to come out of the house? Or further still, to when he was a toddler, unresponsive in his high chair? A rap on the window made her jump, and in the glass, a fist pale and spangled with age spots, and beyond that, the smiling face of the priest. He stepped back to let her out and shoved his fingers into the deep pockets of his gray cardigan.
“I saw you from the house and didn’t know if you’d had a change of heart.”
“Just collecting my thoughts. It’s good of you to see me on such short notice.”
“Have you managed to find them all?”
“My thoughts? No, I suppose if I had, I wouldn’t need to come in.”
“Well, now, if there are any stray thoughts wandering about, they better come in out of the cold. Shall we?” He laid a hand against the small of her back to guide her to the rectory.
Inside, the house was less austere than she had imagined. No monks, no Spartan cells, but a plain New England home, the walls a Bristol green, the wainscoting two shades darker. Here and there, evidence of an old man’s miscellany: a rocker and a plaid stadium blanket, bookshelves cluttered with classics, a framed nautical chart of the coastline, a pair of snowshoes hanging by the door. The house smelled faintly of witch hazel and incense.